* * *
THE HALLS WERE dark, but Ugo knew his way. For a man of his size he was soundless even when we entered the first monstrous corridors of stacks.
I had expected old wooden bookcases piled high in vast frescoed arches. Instead there were low, industrial tunnels longer than ocean liners, veined with electrical conduit. On the cold metal decks my shoes made a slapping sound that echoed down the corridors, and I had to stoop to avoid hitting my head on the caged lightbulbs. But Ugo traveled deftly, as if the drinks had only limbered him up.
The steel stacks were on all sides of us now—left and right, above and below—floor upon floor connected by attic-like openings linked by narrow ship-ladders. Ugo relied on the flashlight he had brought because the overhead bulbs were on timers. Down we went, and down again. At last we came to an elevator.
“Where does it go?” I asked.
My voice, just as the French priest had warned, rebounded across the marble floors, shearing through the woolly darkness.
“To the very bottom,” Ugo whispered.
The doors closed after us, and the car immediately went dark. The beam of Ugo’s flashlight went straight to the control panel. Before I could even read the inscriptions there, he had launched us on a slow descent.
The doors reopened on an area with butter-colored walls and fluorescent lights. There were no shelves here, only the occasional crucifix and holy icon on the walls, separated by fire detectors and boxes of emergency lights. All of it had the unfamiliar, chemical odor of newness.
“Are we underground?” I whispered.
Ugo nodded and led me around the bend, murmuring, “Now to see if he was right.”
Around the corner we came to an immense door built entirely of steel. The adjoining wall was mounted with a security keypad.
But instead of entering a passcode, Ugo reached his fingers behind the lip of the door and leaned backward.
The slab of steel quietly swung open. Beyond it lay darkness.
“Excellent,” Ugo muttered. Then he turned and said, “Touch absolutely nothing until I explain why this door was left unlocked.”
He reached inside to twist the timer on the electric lights. When they came on, my legs went numb.
Twenty years ago, John Paul had broken ground on a new project. The Vatican Library had run out of shelf space, so in a small courtyard north of the library, where employees once grew vegetables in wartime and where Uncle Lucio now ran a café to squeeze money from visiting scholars, John Paul dug a pit. Into it he poured the foundation of a bombproof concrete chamber, designed for his most prized possessions. Today, when scholars sipped drinks at Lucio’s café, they stood on a thin layer of grass concealing the steel-reinforced crypt of John Paul’s treasures.
As a child I had imagined the place. It was, in my daydreams, as large as a bank vault. But the room that now lay before me was the size of a small airfield. The main passage was half the length of a soccer field, with aisles on either side deep enough to park a tour bus.
“Behold,” Ugo whispered, “the world’s greatest collection of manuscripts.”
There are two kinds of books in the world. Since the time of Gutenberg, printed books have been spawned by the millions, mass-produced by machines, blotting out the older species of book: manuscripts. An illiterate Renaissance businessman with a printing press could spew ten books faster than a team of educated monks could hand-make a single manuscript page. Considering how few manuscripts were produced, and how much mistreatment they endured over the centuries, it’s a miracle any have survived. But since books were first invented, they have had a powerful friend: there has always been a Christian Church to make them, and a pope in Rome to collect them. Of all the great libraries in human history, only one still exists. And by the grace of God, into the heart of that library I now stepped.